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Checkmk vs Grafana: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Checkmk and Grafana are both popular monitoring tools used in the IT industry. While they serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between the two platforms that set them apart. In this analysis, we will explore these differences to help you understand when to choose one over the other.

  1. Data Sources: Checkmk primarily focuses on monitoring various types of systems, applications, and networks through active and passive checks. It enables monitoring through agents and plugins that collect data from different sources. On the other hand, Grafana acts as a visualization tool that allows you to connect to various data sources, including databases, APIs, and other monitoring tools, consolidating data into a unified interface.

  2. Dashboard Creation: Checkmk offers a predefined set of templates and widgets to build customized dashboards. Its interface is designed for system administrators and operations teams to monitor and manage their infrastructure efficiently. Meanwhile, Grafana provides a highly customizable and interactive dashboard builder with a wide range of visualization options. It allows users to create visually appealing dashboards tailored to their specific requirements.

  3. Alerting Capabilities: When it comes to alerting, Checkmk offers sophisticated alert management features. It provides flexible rule-based alerting and escalation mechanisms, ensuring that the right people are notified at the right time. Additionally, it supports integrations with various notification channels. Conversely, Grafana's native alerting capabilities are more limited. It relies heavily on external services like Prometheus Alertmanager for robust alerting functionality.

  4. Community and Integration: Checkmk boasts a large and active community, offering extensive community-contributed plug-ins, extensions, and integrations. This allows users to extend the platform's capabilities and integrate it with a wide range of tools seamlessly. Grafana also has an active community, but it primarily focuses on integrations with other monitoring solutions and visualization plugins.

  5. Scalability and Performance: Checkmk is designed to handle large-scale monitoring environments, making it suitable for enterprises with extensive infrastructure. It is capable of horizontally scaling by adding distributed monitoring instances. On the other hand, Grafana is more lightweight and targeted towards visualizing data rather than scaling horizontally. It is ideal for smaller environments with less complex monitoring requirements.

  6. Ease of Use: Checkmk excels in ease of use, providing a comprehensive web-based interface that streamlines the process of monitoring and managing IT systems. It offers predefined check plugins, automatic inventory discovery, and intuitive configuration options, making it accessible even for non-technical users. While Grafana offers powerful visualization capabilities, it has a steeper learning curve due to its extensive customization options and flexible query editors.

In Summary, Checkmk focuses on monitoring systems, applications, and networks, offering robust alerting and ease of use, while Grafana excels in data visualization, supporting various data sources and customization options. Choose Checkmk for comprehensive monitoring needs and extensive community support, whereas Grafana is a suitable choice for visualizing data from multiple sources in a customizable manner.

Advice on Checkmk and Grafana
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 781.4K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

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Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 566.7K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.

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Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 710.8K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

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Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/

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Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.

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Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafana
and
KibanaKibana

From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."

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Replies (7)
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana
at

For our Predictive Analytics platform, we have used both Grafana and Kibana

Kibana has predictions and ML algorithms support, so if you need them, you may be better off with Kibana . The multi-variate analysis features it provide are very unique (not available in Grafana).

For everything else, definitely Grafana . Especially the number of supported data sources, and plugins clearly makes Grafana a winner (in just visualization and reporting sense). Creating your own plugin is also very easy. The top pros of Grafana (which it does better than Kibana ) are:

  • Creating and organizing visualization panels
  • Templating the panels on dashboards for repetetive tasks
  • Realtime monitoring, filtering of charts based on conditions and variables
  • Export / Import in JSON format (that allows you to version and save your dashboard as part of git)
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Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

I use both Kibana and Grafana on my workplace: Kibana for logging and Grafana for monitoring. Since you already work with Elasticsearch, I think Kibana is the safest choice in terms of ease of use and variety of messages it can manage, while Grafana has still (in my opinion) a strong link to metrics

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Bram Verdonck
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana
at

After looking for a way to monitor or at least get a better overview of our infrastructure, we found out that Grafana (which I previously only used in ELK stacks) has a plugin available to fully integrate with Amazon CloudWatch . Which makes it way better for our use-case than the offer of the different competitors (most of them are even paid). There is also a CloudFlare plugin available, the platform we use to serve our DNS requests. Although we are a big fan of https://smashing.github.io/ (previously dashing), for now we are starting with Grafana .

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Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

I use Kibana because it ships with the ELK stack. I don't find it as powerful as Splunk however it is light years above grepping through log files. We previously used Grafana but found it to be annoying to maintain a separate tool outside of the ELK stack. We were able to get everything we needed from Kibana.

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Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

Kibana should be sufficient in this architecture for decent analytics, if stronger metrics is needed then combine with Grafana. Datadog also offers nice overview but there's no need for it in this case unless you need more monitoring and alerting (and more technicalities).

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Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana

I use Grafana because it is without a doubt the best way to visualize metrics

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Povilas Brilius
PHP Web Developer at GroundIn Software · | 0 upvotes · 591.8K views
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana
at

@Kibana, of course, because @Grafana looks like amateur sort of solution, crammed with query builder grouping aggregates, but in essence, as recommended by CERN - KIbana is the corporate (startup vectored) decision.

Furthermore, @Kibana comes with complexity adhering ELK stack, whereas @InfluxDB + @Grafana & co. recently have become sophisticated development conglomerate instead of advancing towards a understandable installation step by step inheritance.

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Pros of Checkmk
Pros of Grafana
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 89
      Beautiful
    • 68
      Graphs are interactive
    • 57
      Free
    • 56
      Easy
    • 34
      Nicer than the Graphite web interface
    • 26
      Many integrations
    • 18
      Can build dashboards
    • 10
      Easy to specify time window
    • 10
      Can collaborate on dashboards
    • 9
      Dashboards contain number tiles
    • 5
      Open Source
    • 5
      Integration with InfluxDB
    • 5
      Click and drag to zoom in
    • 4
      Authentification and users management
    • 4
      Threshold limits in graphs
    • 3
      Alerts
    • 3
      It is open to cloud watch and many database
    • 3
      Simple and native support to Prometheus
    • 2
      Great community support
    • 2
      You can use this for development to check memcache
    • 2
      You can visualize real time data to put alerts
    • 0
      Grapsh as code
    • 0
      Plugin visualizationa

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Checkmk
    Cons of Grafana
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 1
        No interactive query builder

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Checkmk?

      Checkmk is a comprehensive solution for IT Monitoring of servers, applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid), containers, storage, databases and environment sensors.

      What is Grafana?

      Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      Jobs that mention Checkmk and Grafana as a desired skillset
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      San Francisco, United States
      What companies use Checkmk?
      What companies use Grafana?
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      What tools integrate with Checkmk?
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      What are some alternatives to Checkmk and Grafana?
      Kibana
      Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.
      Prometheus
      Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.
      Nagios
      Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.
      Zabbix
      Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.
      OpenCensus
      It is a set of libraries for various languages that allow you to collect application metrics and distributed traces, then transfer the data to a backend of your choice in real time. This data can be analyzed by developers and admins to understand the health of the application and debug problems.
      See all alternatives